The Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and the Sixties: a Memoir

Garry Neill Kennedy

The Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and the Sixties: A Memoir

In 19671 was contacted by board officials of the Nova Scotia College of Art to see if I was interested in becoming their president. I was in my second year as the head of the art department at Northland College, Ashland, Wisconsin then. Wisconsin was cold, I was thirty years old, a Canadian from Ontario and with fond childhood memories of living in Nova Scotia. So, I thought, why not? I had confidence in my views on art and in my teaching. At Northland I had many students enthusiastically making art based on the new movements of the sixties, pop and minimal- ism. I thought, if interesting and exciting work could happen in the back woods of Wisconsin, it could happen in Nova Scotia. In 1967, the Nova Scotia College of Art was eighty years old, but it had fewer than one hundred and twenty-five full-time students, and a teaching staff of only nine. With an annual budget of about $100,000 derived mostly from city and province, it was not wealthy. Its facilities too were meagre: there was an old four-story building with a few tools, some easels, plaster casts to draw from, studios for classes in ceramics, weaving, design, printmaking, photography, drawing and painting. The studio teaching programs were firmly tied to the past, and while there were courses in art history, there was no attention given to art that was made after the early part of the century: abstract art was still a topic open for debate. But I liked the College, I had respect for its tenacity, and already there were plans for a new wing on the drawing board. NSCAD was a place that had hung on for eighty years waiting, it seemed, for the time when the government

192 would finally recognize that it had an important role in Nova Scotia. Founded mostly through the efforts of Anna Leonowens (of Anna and the King of Siam), the College had been served by many fine leaders, among them Arthur Lismer (1916-1919), Elizabeth Nutt (1919-1943), and D.C. Mackay (1945-1966), all of whom were active artists and committed teachers. Looking back over the College's history, it seemed to me that these leaders had had two central preoccupations: one to keep the place alive and, two, to keep it adequately housed. These were the circumstances when I took over from D.C. Mackay. In my early years in Halifax I was so involved with the College that I don't really have a good take on the city at that time. Though the war in Viet Nam was raging when I left the United States, there was a feeling there that protest could stop it. The war, the riots, the shootings at Kent State, and the assassination of King and Kennedy all occurred far away from Halifax, but television, the music of that time and expatriate Americans brought the message of a deeply troubled society. Protest across Canada was limited mostly to the universities. In the Maritimes there were sporadic outbreaks at neighboring Dalhousie University and major disruptions at the University of New Brunswick. Students were calling for change, insisting on the need for universities to get involved in real issues. Universities were accused of remaining aloof from social problems while at the same time supporting the "military industrial complex" through research and financial investment. Students wanted a voice in the decisions that universities were making, par- ticularly in determining the content and structure of their own courses. There was a demand for "relevancy," that elusive catchword of the sixties. The young artists and teachers I began to recruit were also looking for relevancy. We recognized the need to bring the ideas embraced by the early years of the century from the margins into the core of the art school curriculum. We needed to acknowledge that we were the heirs to the great art of the dadas, the futurists, the surrealists, the constructivists. Pop artists, fluxus artists, happenings and performance, innovative dancers, filmmakers and musicians, were all out there: all we had to do was bring them into the institution. In a talk given at the College in November, 1969, the New York critic Lucy Lippard, an early supporter of the new art, described the new possibilities of the times. She spoke of the changing structures of the traditional art hier- archy, which had become decentralized by moving out of such centres as New York:

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. . . The impermanent art that is being done now demands that artists travel as well as the art. As artists travel to different cities and countries, they talk to other people and to other artists who are in turn directed to ideas of their own rather than waiting for the objects to be dragged up to where they are, which often takes a long time. Europe is wide open for this kind of decentralization process now, and Canada probably still more so. Europe now is comparable to America, or New York, in the Thirties. It has a gallery structure, a museum structure, but they are fantastically irrelevant, and it seems possible for artists working in Europe to do much more about breaking out of this structure than it does for artists working in New York. Because New York has a very, very strong gallery, museum, critic, collector, magazine oriented power structure and it's going to take an awful lot of energy to get rid of it. In Canada, maybe you can start from scratch and don't even have to mess with breaking down any barriers.

Her remark about Canada seemed convincing: There was no city or provin- cial art gallery. There were no curators, no critics. The art of the province was scattered and much of it was in storage—there was no single place to see it. Some of it was at the College, some at Dalhousie University, some at the Nova Scotia Museum, and some in the Nova Scotia Archives. With rare exception, notably the work of Leroy Zwicker, most of the active artists of the province made landscape or seaside paintings or seascapes. Some of them were very good, but they looked to times past, and considering the needs of the sixties, they were irrelevant. The College had no personal links with a modernist past among its senior staff similar to the connections provided by the abstract painter Jock MacDonald at the Ontario College of Art or Jack Shadbolt at the Vancouver College of Art. In this sense, there was a vacuum in Halifax and the chance to make of the College a visual arts centre not only for the area but for the country and beyond. This feat could be accomplished by bringing in people and ideas, from New York and Europe. Thus the creation of a situation allowing the best young artists from North America and Europe to make visits long and short to the College became the core principle of the new NSCAD structure. But we also had to attract active professional artists and craftspersons to the faculty, individuals who were not only committed to teaching but who were also aware of what was going on in the art world and of the artists who were making things happen in Canada, the States and Europe. To meet this need I began in 1968 by appointing mostly people from the States: David Askevold, Gerald Ferguson, Jack Lemon, Bill Nolan, and Bob Rogers (all from the Kansas City Art Institute), John Pearson from Britain

194 (but working in New Mexico) and Pat Kelly, a colleague from Northland College.1 We used no other college as a model. In the past the College had limited itself by looking to the Ontario College of Art for educational direction. Having graduated from OCA myself and having acquired an M.F.A. in the States, there was no doubt in my mind that the College should look further than central Canada for inspiration. However, there was no rigid over- all plan prescribing what the College was to look like. There was just the simple notion that there were interesting artists, either on the faculty or as visitors to the College, who had a desire to pass on their ideas to students. An educational structure (that is, standards, courses, programs, timetables, grades, and so on) would then fall into place. Nobody was worried in those days about what the College would look like on paper. The sixties fostered a spirit of trial and error, and for the most part errors were soon forgotten in the rush to move on to something more exciting. If an idea made sense, we gave it a try. Below I describe some of the "tries" which worked out.

The Halifax Conference The Halifax Conference was a curious event if there ever was one. In early 1969, Seth Siegelaub, a New York supporter, dealer and curator of much of the conceptual art that was emerging at the time, approached the College. Siegelaub thought it would be of value to have important artists from around the world meet in one place. That place, he suggested, should be NSCAD. We agreed, and the Benson & Hedges tobacco company offered to sponsor the event. In his proposal for the conference Siegelaub rationalized its purpose in words that made perfect sense only in the sixties:

[it] ... is conceived to bring about a meeting of artists in as general a situation as possible, so that the responsibility for the direction of the conference will be the accumulation of the individual concerns of each artist. Because no specific topic of discussion has been imposed on the conference, the reason for each artist attending the conference is the total reason for the conference. The idea was to have twenty-five artists from seven countries meet for two days in a room closed to the public. However, the students were to watch the proceedings live by a video monitoring system in the gallery. Later there would be a verbatim transcript. The artists who actually made the trip were Carl Andre, Ian Baxter, Joseph Beuys, Ronald Bladen, Daniel Buren, John Chamberlain, Jan Dibbets, Al Held, Robert Irwin, Mario Merz, Robert Morris, Robert Murray, Richard Serra, Richard Smith, Robert Smithson,

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Michael Snow and Lawrence Weiner. Those who were invited but did not show were Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Larry Poons, Robert Rauschenberg and Jean Tingueley. The conference in fact would have been dull except that a few lively things happened to make it interesting. Morris, Serra and Smithson had a problem with the format. With all the artists on the inside and all the students on the outside, they claimed it was elitist. They were also upset with the College's plans to profit from a publication of the conference proceedings. Although we agreed to destroy the tapes so that we could not profit from them, we could not resolve the format issue; as a result, Serra, Morris and Smithson went home. Others also left, more out of boredom, I feel, than out of sym- pathy with the protest at hand. There was no question, however, that the informal contacts between faculty, students, and artists gave a great lift to the College. It certainly put the College on the international if not the local map, as the headline of the next day's paper read "Benson and Hedges Goes Up in Smoke" (the same writer captioned the 1969 Lawrence Weiner exhibition in the College gallery, "Hot Dog It's A Weiner"). There was an important sequel. A telegram was received from New York signed by a number of women, the name of only one of whom I recognized —Lucy Lippard. It was a stinging statement, condemning the conference for not having included women. But it had been even more shameful than the signers realized for, though present at the conference, Serra's wife, Joan Jonas, was excluded from the proceedings as were Michael Snow's wife, Joyce Wieland, and Ian Baxter's wife, Elaine Baxter (his partner in the N.E. Thing Co.). The telegram set the stage for the beginnings of change, albeit prolonged and gradual, toward gender equity within the institution.

Projects Class We found different ways of making sound use of the visiting artists. Some came for a week or less, others for either a term or a full year. We accomplished these arrangements by leaving full-time vacancies open for visitors or by filling sabbaticals with visiting artists. Further, our summer term was reserved almost exclusively for visiting artists. An innovative variation on the use of the visiting artist was a class initiated and produced in the Fall of 1969 by David Askevold, the Projects Class. Askevold invited a number of artists (it is important to note that these individuals had not reached the prominence in the artworld that they were

196 later to have, though many of them did their best work in the sixties) to submit works or projects for the students in the Projects Class to make or undertake. In most cases the artist would visit the College to discuss the work with the class. Sometimes, however, communication was carried out from a distance. Artists who participated included James Lee Byers, Robert Barry, Mel Bochner, Jan Dibbets, Dan Graham, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Sol Le Witt, LucyLippard, N.E.Thing Co. Ltd., Robert Smithson and Lawrence Weiner. The project submitted by the Dutch artist, Jan Dibbets, for instance, reads: Photos of tree shadows every 10 minutes 1. Find a place in a not too closely overgrown part of the woods where there are very clear shadows. 2. Use one or more days to find out exactly how the shadows are moving: when they start and what moment they come into camera view. Try to get as much as you can from the trees in the photos keeping in mind that their shadows are the most important. 3. When everything is ready start taking the photos. #i-no shadow, #2-first shadow, #3-extended shadow, etc. Take one every ten minutes. Choose a day with uninterrupted sunshine. 4. Make a work drawing on paper. Glue all the photos (contact prints— small) in order of succession and hang in order; the negatives on negative- leafs. 5. Make two prints of each on paper 24x24 centimeters and 30x30 centimeters. Hang them in a row so only the shadow is moving. For his submission to the Projects Class, Mel Bochner invited the students to "measure/consider (subjectively also) the classroom in every possible way they can think of, i.e. height, length, volume (walls, doors, floor, windows etc.), temperature, humidity, thickness of walls, amount of illumi- nation, number of objects, how it feels to be there, etc. It doesn't matter to me what the specific details are or how they are presented." One work, Douglas Huebler's, had the students create a myth. The students created a fictitious art school and published an ad for it, announcing its art star faculty in leading art magazines. One of the responses was a letter from the lawyer of Frank Stella asking to have his name removed. The students in the Projects Class were Marylou Bowstead, Richards Jarden, Jo Knapp, Sue Krassman, Al McNarama, Ron Saab, Terrel Seltzer, John Young and Tim Zuck.

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Lithography Workshop and the NSCAD Press The Professional Lithography Workshop and the Press of Nova Scotia College of Art and Design helped the College develop innovative ways of involving the visiting artist. Gerald Ferguson had earlier introduced me at the Kansas City Art Institute to Jack Lemon, a master printer who had recently graduated from The Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, the centre responsible for re-establishing the importance of hand lithography in the U.S. In Kansas City, Lemon had set up a small professional workshop in the basement of one of the college buildings where he made prints with important Midwestern artists. As this procedure seemed a useful idea for NSCAD to build upon, I appointed Lemon to build and direct the Lithography Workshop of the College and also to be responsible for setting up the student lithography and intaglio areas. In the sixties there was much federal money available for post-secondary technical and vocational education, and the federal government not only paid for our intaglio and litho areas but also for the building and equipping of our new six-story building including a gallery. By 1969 we had the finest printmaking facilities in the country. The objective of the professional shop was to invite to the College artists to work, in collabora- tion with our master printer, to make limited editions of lithographs. There would be several very positive consequences to this scheme: the students would have direct contact with professionals from the world they were being prepared to enter, and as shop assistants they would get "hands on" experience with the craft of making hand-pulled lithographs. Further, the knowledge of this newly revived form of art would enter the outside world through the exhibition and sale of the prints. As none of the artists invited had had experience with lithography, the mast printers (Jack Lemon and Bob Rogers) would look after the production process, and the artists would deal with the creative process. Obviously this old world system required mutual respect for the other's abilities, truly a collaborative enterprise. The presence of the Litho Workshop within the College offered many of the artists an opportunity to experiment with the medium. It also helped some artists to involve the students directly in the process of making the print. Further, there was no undue pressure to make saleable products as most of the shop's overhead was carried by the College. Among my most poignant memories of some of the earlier works is Joyce Wieland kissing the litho stone with her lipsticked lips to the syllables of "Oh

198 Canada." I think it was her best work because it showed (literally) an astute understanding of lithography, a process which depends on the antipathy of grease (lipstick) and water, at the same time carrying a clever nationalist/ feminist statement, her main theme at that time. (Incidentally, Canadian nationalists like Wieland, Greg Curnoe and John Boyle dismissed the College as an American outpost, and we wondered why they bothered to come at all. It seemed strange to Nova Scotians to have all this interest from Ontario.) Sol Lewitt made good use of students in the production of his suite often lithographs. He simply mailed instructions to the shop indicating how his work should be drawn, and students were hired as draftspersons to carry out the instructions. This process of course is consistent with all of LeWitt's work as he stated in 1967 "that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair." As a result, one of the ten prints followed instructions like these: Within a twenty inch square area, using a black, hard crayon, draw ten thousand free-hand lines, of any length, at random. The Baldessari print, "I will not make any more boring art," is as famous in the United States as the Wieland print is in Canada. At that time John Baldessari lived in Los Angeles and was a teacher at the California Institute of the Arts,2 the college which, like NSCAD, was developed in the sixties into a high profile centre for serious students of contemporary art. As a response to an invitation to mount an exhibition in our Mezzanine Gallery, Balderssari requested that as a penance students be invited to write repeat- edly on the gallery wall in pencil the words, "I will not make any more boring art." The handwritten example for the text that Baldessari mailed to the gallery was used as the image for the lithograph (as an old hand at lithography, I had the privilege of printing this edition myself). Many other prints by many other artists were produced over the years to include 110 different prints by 55 artists, many of whom were relatively unknown at the time of their invitation to the College. The lithographs as a collection have been part of different exhibitions, the first in 1971 at the Museum of Modern Art, the second in a circulating show organized by the National Gallery of Canada, the third in the mid-eighties in the Landgrant Universities of New England. The Litho Workshop continued into the mid-seventies when for a number of reasons I felt it might better be put to rest. It was expensive. As they operated concurrently for three years, the Litho Workshop was in competi-

199 Kennedy tion for College funds with the NSCAD Press which was becoming a more important activity for the times. So there was pressure on the Litho Workshop to make money. It did not seem like a good idea for a university to make prints primarily for the purpose of producing revenues; this was the role of a commercial press, not NSCAD. Further, we had problems keeping our master printers. After Wallie Brennan had gone north to set up the workshop at Cape Dorset, we appointed John Hutchenson. When he was attracted away to a shop in New York, it became evident that the money was not available to keep top quality master printers. One artist invited to do a print in the workshop, Lawrence Weiner, did not choose to make a print; instead, he made a book (actually the second book of his career) entitled, Flowed. Weiner was to go on, of course, to make scores of books, a medium for which he is as well known as for his posters, films, videos, music and installations. However, it was Dan Graham, an artist who had been affiliated with the College since 1970 when he did his first solo show, who suggested that the publication of books would be a viable enterprise for the College to embark upon, and he also suggested Kasper Kônig as the person who was best suited to head such a venture. Kônig's background was in books. With his brother Walther (who operates one of the most prominent art book stores in Europe), he had published books with several artists including Gilbert and George, Stanley Brouwn and Jan Dibbets. He had also been a freelance curator having put together the 1968 Warhol retrospective in Stockholm as well as its impres- sive catalogue, a book described by Benjamin Buchloh as one of the best artists' books of the sixties. Kônig was appointed the resident editor/director of the press and the plan, on the suggestion of Dennis Young, then head of art history, was to publish "Source Materials of the Contemporary Arts." The idea was to fol- low a program which would stress original writings by artists and give emphasis to documentation rather than to books written about artists' work or photo books of artists' works. For me, this program appeared to satisfy the needs of the College in a way similar to that of the Litho Workshop: artists would be attracted to visit the College while working on their books, while the books would contribute to the advancement of knowledge in the visual areas to which the College had committed itself. We felt that the books, like the workshop prints, would not have appeared without the support of the College—the true role of a university press. But

200 we had to be flexible. The first book, for example, only loosely fell within the guidelines. While it was scarcely source material, it did provide documentation on Ludwig Wittgenstein's architecture, and Wittgenstein's philo- sophical writings were of basic interest to many conceptual artists of the sixties. Other books fell more in line. Thus Raw Notes by Claes Oldenburg documented previously unpublished texts of performances from the sixties: Stars, 1963; Movey-house, 1965; Massage, 1966; The Typewriter, 1968. Yvonne Rainer's Work 1961-73 follows the development of this most influential artist including her early solo dances and her work in narrative, slide projections, film and spoken and projected texts. Other books under Kônig's editorship were Simone Forti's Handbook in Motion, Steve Reich's Writings About Music, Hans Haacke's Framing and Being Framed, Donald Judd's The Complete Writings 1959-1975, Michael Snow's Cover to Cover (1975) and Paul Emile Borduas' Ecrits/Writings 1942-1958 (1978). While Kônig was the key person overseeing this enterprise, others played important roles in seeing the books to their completion. Emmet Williams, the renowned poet and artist who was teaching at NSCAD at the time, col- laborated in completing the manuscript for Simone Forti's book, and Dennis Young edited the Wittgenstein book and translated and coedited the Borduas publication with François Gagnon and Benjamin Buchloh.

It goes without saying that the involvement of all these people in the activity provided an exciting energy around NSCAD during those times. Simone Forti gave several performances, and there were at least two presentations by Yvonne Rainer of her work. Both Steve Reich and Hans Haacke taught summer terms. Claes Oldenburg came up to make a print in the Litho Workshop to help defray the costs of his book, and Michael Snow also taught for a term during which he edited and first screened his marathon film, Region Central. Kônig was like a magnet drawing many important artists to the College. In fact, he set up a summer film program taught by filmmakers Robert Frank and Peter Kubelka and a film history class taught by Yon Barna. The influence of Robert Frank's film course can still be felt. Many local filmmakers attribute the growth of the Halifax film- making activity to Frank's many visits to the city. Kônig negotiated a co- publishing arrangement for all of these books with New York University Press. As well as defraying some of the costs, the NYU link provided a good distribution system. In due course, however, the costs of producing this

201 Kennedy kind of specialized book became too burdensome for both NSCAD and NYU, and in 1976 we ceased operation. After a few years, however, it again seemed feasible to operate the Press if we could hire a director with part-time faculty responsibilities. Benjamin Buchloh who was teaching contemporary art history at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dusseldorf was an ideal candidate for such a position. With experience in writing criticism for museum catalogues and editing several volumes of the publication Interfunktionen, Buchloh was indeed a natural for the position, and when his outline for an editorial program was approved, he joined the College in 1978 as general editor of the Press and instructor in art history. Buchloh saw the Konig years as having focused on artists who had shaped and denned art in the sixties ranging from pop art through minimal art with parallel activities in performance, dance and music. Under his leadership the bias was toward the historical acknowl- edgement of artists who emerged out of the post-minimal and conceptual context. And to its credit there were no rigid barriers limiting the Press from doing a book simply because it was felt to be important, in spite of the guidelines of its program. Under Buchloh's tenure the Press completed the unfinished Borduas and Michael Asher books and initiated and completed the Dan Graham, Video. Architecture- Television: Writings on Video and Video Works 1970-1978 (1979), the Hollis Frampton/ Carl Andre 12 Dialogues 1962-1963, Daniel Buren's Les Couleurs: sculptures/Les Formes: peintures, Mining Photographs and Other Pictures, photographs by Leslie Shedden with essays by Allan Sekula and Don MacGillivray, Modernism and Modernity edited by Serge Guilbaut and Benjamin Buchloh. Buchloh also initiated a pamphlet series that included 3 Works by Martha Rosier, Gerhard Richter's 128 Details From a Picture (Halifax 1978) and Jenny Holzer's Truisms and Essays. Sekula's Photography Against the Grain, and Dara Birnbaum's Rough Edits: Popular Image Video were finished after Buchloh had departed to take a teaching position in New York, as was the catalogue for the Lawrence Weiner Poster Archives of NSCAD. As under Kasper Konig the Buchloh years as director generated great activity throughout the College. All the principals who were involved in the books took part in the academic life of the College in one form or another. Holzer, Rosier, Richter, Birnbaum, Sekula, Weiner, all taught and held exhibitions of their work, and both Rosier and Buren gave addresses to NSCAD graduating classes. Since the departure of Buchloh, the Press (in name only, as the Press is

202 now defunct) recently copublished with MIT Press the proceedings of a colloquium sponsored by the College to celebrate its centennial and the centennial of Marcel Duchamp. The Marcel Duchamp centennial colloquium was organized by Dennis Young and Thierry de Duve, and the book (edited by Thierry de Duve) The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp proved to be an outstanding contribution to the discourse on this influential artist.

Other "tries" for relevancy There were many other NSCAD initiatives that grew out of the optimism of the sixties, an optimism shared by both faculty and students. The hedonistic lifestyle and aesthetic indulgence commonly associated with the youth of the "laid back" sixties did not seem to be at odds with the rather stringent aesthetic adopted by the NSCAD faculty who focused on rationally-based art directions. The origins of NSCAD's current extensive network of student mobility programs3 can be traced back to 1969 when a group of students decided to organize a course called World Encounter. This program enabled them to gain a year's credit by completing projects in either academic or studio sub- jects while travelling around the world. And from this outward looking approach to education came the idea for establishing a base in New York City. In order that students could see and study current art as well as visit the broad choice of historical museums, the College has maintained a loft space in Manhattan's Soho area since 1972. The Mezzanine Gallery was established in 1969 to provide another means of international communication. Under the direction of Charlotte Townsend-Gault, the Mezzanine Gallery operated for about three years. Often seen as the prototype of the artist-run spaces which developed across the country in the seventies, it operated on a minimal budget as it was less concerned with the object art (painting and sculpture) than with easily transportable material like artists' books, photo documentary, printed work, video tapes, and so on. Mezzanine shows turned over rapidly, and its roster of exhibitors, while also including the work of faculty and students, reads like a who's who of international conceptual art—John Baldessari, Joseph Kosuth, Bruce Maclean, Vito Acconci, Lee Lozano, Tony Shafrazi, Jackie Winsor, William Vazan and Eleanor Antin. One of NSCAD's major accomplishments, the development of its new campus in the historic waterfront section of downtown Halifax, was close to

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home. Having outgrown the uptown premises, the College needed addi- tional space. Two recently appointed architects to the design faculty, Bob Parker and Bill Smith, suggested that old buildings in the downtown core be restored for the purpose. Having spent a good part of the sixties as designers in the Boston area, they were aware of the benefits to the life of a city gained by refurbishing rather than demolishing a city's downtown core. It was clear to them that Halifax's historic waterfront was the ideal spot for NSCAD; it would not only serve as a great campus but would also halt City plans to destroy much of the historic areas to make space for a four-lane harbour drive and for more high rise buildings. With great (financial and political) support from the Province and from citizen committees, the College and its developer led a movement which successfully rescued a three block area of heritage buildings, a large section of which forms today's NSCAD campus, one of the finest among art schools anywhere.

Every possible effort has been made to identify the origin of the quotations used in this essay. 1 The two British designers Tony Mann and Frank Fox were also appointed to lead the development and expansion of the design division. The American ceramics artist Walter Ostrom lent his expertise to the development of the craft area. While these areas made great impact upon their professions, the major thrust of the school in the sixties was in the fine arts studio area. Its local and international impact ultimately attracted new faculty to the whole college. Another former Northland colleague, James Davies, was brought in as Dean to oversee the integration of studio activity with an academic curriculum, thus enabling NSCAD to be the first degree granting art college in Canada. 2 There have been strong ties over the years between Cal Arts and NSCAD. CIA had been the Chouinard College of Art in Los Angeles when taken over by the Disney family (it was in Disney's will that it be established) with great fanfare in 1968. In 1971 it moved out to Valencia, a bedroom community of L.A. Its existence, its location, its success are as puzzling to me as the location, existence and success of NSCAD. 3 The College now enjoys student exchange arrangements with over 40 art and design col- leges and universities around the world. Throughout the year there are 20 to 30 exchange students visiting NSCAD and about the same number of our students studying across Canada and abroad.

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